Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning
TAKE MY GAY LITTLE HAND
A young woman I drew a little while ago - I don’t have my digital art things with me. She has brown hair and glasses, and a golden halo. She wears a green mantle, a green sash and green boots. Beneath, she wears a chainmail bikini. She carries a knife in one hand, and a sweeping scimitar in the other. She reminds me a bit of myself.
It's Sunday, January 12th, and I'm on a train, nursing two bags. I'm on a one-week work trip upstate, and when I get back the U.S. may be substantially different.
I may be asked to dump my medication, to use the wrong restroom, to throw the name change forms I've been waiting to file in the trash, to die and disappear. It's hard to know what they'll actually do, but I'm ready for the worst.
I agree with the leading philosophy - death before detransition. They'll have to take my estradiol from my cold, dead hands, etcetera. But, more crucially, death before normalcy, before assimilation, before agreement.
I'm going to make TTRPGs far worse, far angrier, far sexier than I have already, because it's one rebellious act of many, and because it feels like the rules are gone. Sure, there will likely be some anti-pornography laws floated or outright passed in the coming years, but it didn't hold any weight when the liberal institutions protected us, so why should we take their censorship seriously? There will be means to make and distribute our art - I believe this.
How do I express this to you, the faggot game designer who is most likely to read a blog about TTRPGs with such an aggressive name? You have to do it now, and loudly, and into the future. You have to make faggot games, faggot game designer.
MAKE FAGGOT GAMES
What is a faggot game, you may ask? Well, it's not really my place to define that for you, but some traits I've noticed among the best include:
Loud queer sexuality, without a desire to make play more comfortable for cishet people and prudes.
Departure from popular axioms around player and character consent, and broad rejection of the modern safety framework for something more interpersonal and robust.
A central role for fetish, kink and sexual fantasies. Faggot games aren't always necessarily /about/ these things, but they loop back to them as much as possible.
A focus on challenging and unexpected visuals. Blend the cozy and the macabre, the outside and the mainstream, in ways they didn't know they even wanted. Keep them guessing.
I am asking you to do this thing, so I should give you the tools to do so. To start, I recommend that you start making faggot games by…
Grabbing a TTRPG that you love and perverting it. This can be a hack, a love-letter, or one of the former that becomes its own thing.
Making friends who make faggot games. I don’t know all the spaces where folks are doing this stuff, but my Discord is a good starting and sharing place, and I hope to make it even more friendly to sharing in the future. Bluesky also has a ton of folks doing this work.
Looking deep within yourself, and seeking old fantasies. Maybe ones you forgot, or cast aside because you believed they were wrong.
I think it's worth noting that this is not a new thing. I'd like to point toward Anna Anthropy's Princess With a Cursed Dick, for example, as a game from years ago that hits basically all of these areas. So, why does it feel like we’re seeing more of it now?
I mean, if I’m being honest? It’s fear, finally breaking. We’ve been afraid, understandably so. It’s terrifying to put kinky, disgusting work out there when people are so rotten-hearted and puritan.
YOUR BODY CAN’T HANDLE MUCH MORE OF THIS
When Nightmare Kart designer Bunlith posted an amazing video of her goth rabbit girl avatar running, yelling and emoting to the audio from the classic 'Takeshi Sex' video (warning, loud), Bunlith got walloped with the classic response transphobes have to trans women having fun online — the freaks came out in droves to call her a pervert, make up shit about her commissioning inflation art, and harass her. Obviously it’s fine to be a pervert and commission inflation art, but they were using this as a method to hurt her and to discredit her.
A trans woman posts something earnest, or sexual, or funny, and the world bites down on her. What was stunning to me about Bunlith’s treatment here, and has been stunning since, has been the failure of the remaining internet to even remotely protect a trans woman joking about sex. See, not only do trans women face the pressure of directly antagonistic transphobes, but their 'allies' then post shit like:
"Bunlith is corny and this video is kinda cringe, but I don't think people should be mean to her."
This might seem innocuous, if you’re not familiar with the dynamics of social media, and especially Twitter. When someone says something like this, it enables the first guys, the transphobes, to be even worse. The world’s worst are gleeful when they realize that no one really likes the person they’re attacking, that even their allies have caveats and realize that this person is, secretly, cringe.
You see how that pressure would make the prospect of creating earnest, horny art seem structurally impossible, right? Not only do you get hit by your abject enemies, but then the people who are supposed to protect you take pot shots. Even alluding to sex as a trans woman makes you a target.
Still, you have to make things, and you have to make horny things. Much like Takeshi’s body cannot handle much more screaming about sex (?), your body can’t handle worrying every time you create something. If they’re going to hate you no matter how much you do, do it all. Run down the highway, screaming. Sex. You must, at some point, become sex.
ENTER: THE FAGGOT LATTICE
A honeycomb. Imagine this, but it’s made up of beautiful transgender perverts. Sweet.
I don't like overestimating my personal impact, because I am fundamentally just a girl with a slick, hot desire for more pornography to fill the world. However, people have said this to me directly - my work has encouraged folks to make faggot games. I'm very proud of this.
I'm not special, though. You can do it too. Making faggot games in your part of the TTRPG space will make the faggot next to you feel more comfortable. We can protect each other from the social murder machine, fight for each other's work hand and limb, and build something beautiful in that sopping lattice. I believe in carrying each other’s weight, in allowing each other to rest, in discussing our fears and hopes and desires in concert. A body cannot handle this, but our bodies can handle this.
This is why you have to make faggot games now, because we need to build that network of security now. We need voices that can stand and shout for each other, that can guide the lost in the coming dark. We need games that tell people it's normal to want to bite girls, and that it's normal to make games about wanting to bite girls. Let’s make art that makes us really, really normal about each other. Let’s trap each other inside psychic prisons for self-gratification. Any sort of connection, but let it be strong and let it be rife with blood and honey.
I am a slutty little honeybee, and you have to pin me down by my wings. We have to repopulate the hive.
THE LIMITS OF FAGGOT GAMES
Photomanip art from WE LIVE FOREVER (And We Love To Live) Complete Edition. A color-drained, negativized parking lot with a hand reaching into it from the dark.
I talk a lot of tough shit, but I am not as active and organized as I'd like to be. I don't really go out after work (I do social work, which can be taxing) and I'm mostly creating art for commercial purposes.
I want to change both of those in 2025. I'm going to look into getting involved with my local DSA, and I want to make more free projects and text-only versions of my games for people to enjoy. I give a lot of myself, but there's a lot more I could give.
So, make faggot games, yea, but get out there and do something meaningful as well. In the U.S., the next few years are going to be brutal, so I think it’s important that I include this acknowledgement here. Making queer, horny art alone will not save everyone, but it might help one person be more comfortable, free, relaxed. It's worth doing, I believe. It's one of the few things I'm sure of.
Come and do it with me? With us? Please? I’ll be a good girl…
